It’s the language that refuses to die, despite efforts across generations to kill it. Te reo celebrated its 35th year as an official language on August 1. Since that recognition in 1987, the language has gone from being a flashpoint at the coalface of racial relations to, increasingly, a source of national pride. Te reo classes are growing, with the number of people on waiting lists at indigenous tertiary education provider Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, for example, regularly topping 1000.
Since 2018, the number of people who can speak more than a few words or phrases of te reo increased from 24% to 30%, according to Stats NZ’s recently published Wellbeing Statistics: 2021. Almost a quarter of Māori (23%) spoke te reo as one of their first languages, with a third professing to speak it “fairly well”.
The report also acknowledged changing attitudes towards te reo and its use, with more than half of Kiwis concluding that the language should be a core subject in primary schools, the government should encourage and support its usage in everyday situations, and that signage should be in both Māori and English.
Yet, despite those shifting views, Unesco still classes te reo as “vulnerable” on its list of endangered languages. Then there’s the January 2020 study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, which predicted that the language would become extinct at current learning rates. The study, by Tessa Barrett-Walker, Michael J. Plank, Rachael Ka’ai-Mahuta, Daniel Hikuroa and Alex James, used statistical modelling and found that too few people speak Māori to save it.
Tā (Sir) Tīmoti Kāretu, the country’s most eminent te reo scholar and the first Māori Language Commissioner, strongly disagrees with the study’s findings. “It will always survive amongst the caring, the hungry and those who want to still be Māori in a way. Because it’s the only thing the differentiates us from anybody else. There’s nothing else,” he says. “I mean, the number of speakers is now as great as it ever was. But there is going to be
